A passer-by, watching Lord Emsworth as he returned some twenty minutes later to Freddie’s dream house down the road, would have said to himself that there went an old gentleman who had found the blue bird, and he would have been right. Lord Emsworth, as he fingered the crisp roll of bills in his trouser pocket, was not actually saying “Whooppee!” but, it was a very near thing. He was feeling as if a great burden had been removed from his shoulders.
The girl was asleep when he reached the house. Gently, without disturbing her slumbers, Lord Emsworth reached for her bag and deposited the five hundred dollars in it. Then he tiptoed out and set a course for the golf club. He wanted to find his son Freddie.
“Ah,” Frederick,” he would say. “So you sell dog biscuits do you? Pooh! Anyone can sell dog biscuits. Give me something tougher, like richly bound encyclopædias of Sport. Now, I strolled out just now and sold a gross at the first house I visited. So don’t talk to me about dog biscuits. In fact, don’t talk to me at all, because I am sick of the sound of your voice. And STOP THAT SINGING!!”
Yes, when Freddie began singing “Buttons and Bows,” that would be the moment to strike.
CHAPTER IX
How’s That, Umpire?
THE story of Conky Biddle’s great love begins at about six-forty-five on an evening in June in the Marylebone district of London. He had spent the day at Lord’s cricket ground watching a cricket match, and driving away at close of play had been held up in a traffic jam. And held up alongside his taxi was a car with a girl at the wheel. And he had just lit a cigarette and was thinking of this and that, when he heard her say:
“Cricket is not a game. It is a mere shallow excuse for walking in your sleep.”
It was at this point that love wound its silken fetters about Conky. He leaped like a jumping bean and the cigarette fell from his nerveless fingers. If a girl who talked like that was not his dream girl, he didn’t know a dream girl when he heard one.
You couldn’t exactly say that he fell in love at first sight, for owing to the fact that in between him and her, obscuring the visibility, there was sitting a robust blighter in blue flannel with a pin stripe, he couldn’t see her. All he had to go on was her voice, but that was ample. It was a charming voice with an American intonation. She was probably, he thought, an American angel who had stepped down from Heaven for a short breather in London.
“If I see another cricket game five thousand years from now,” she said, “that’ll be soon enough.”
Her companion plainly disapproved of these cracks. He said in a stiff, sniffy sort of way that she had not seen cricket at its best that afternoon, play having been greatly interfered with by rain.
“A merciful dispensation,” said the girl. “Cricket with hardly any cricket going on is a lot better than cricket where the nuisance persists uninterrupted. In my opinion the ideal contest would be one where it rained all day and the rival teams stayed home doing their crossword puzzles.”
The traffic jam then broke up and the car shot forward like a B.29, leaving the taxi nowhere.
The reason why this girl’s words had made so deep an impression on the young Biddle was that of all things in existence, with the possible exception of slugs and his uncle Everard, Lord Plumpton, he disliked cricket most. As a boy he had been compelled to play it, and grown to man’s estate he was compelled to watch it. And if there was one spectacle that saddened him more than another in a world where the man of sensibility is always being saddened by spectacles, it was that of human beings, the heirs of the ages, waddling about in pads and shouting “How’s that, umpire?”
He had to watch cricket because Lord Plumpton told him to, and he was dependent on the other for his three squares a day. Lord Plumpton was a man who knew the batting averages of every first-class cricketer back to the days when they used to play in top hats and whiskers, and recited them to Conky after dinner. He liked to show Conky with the assistance of an apple (or, in winter, of an orange) how Bodger of Kent got the fingerspin which enabled him to make the ball dip and turn late on a sticky wicket. And frequently when Conky was walking along the street with him and working up to touching him for a tenner, he would break off the conversation at its most crucial point in order to demonstrate with his umbrella how Codger of Sussex made his late cut through the slips.
It was to the home of this outstanding louse, where he had a small bedroom on an upper floor, that Conky was now on his way. Arriving at journey’s end, he found a good deal of stir and bustle going on, with doctors coming downstairs with black bags and parlourmaids going upstairs with basins of gruel, and learned from the butler that Lord Plumpton had sprained his ankle.
“No, really?” said Conky, well pleased, for if his uncle had possessed as many ankles as a centipede he would thoroughly have approved of him spraining them all. “I suppose I had better go up and view the remains.”
He proceeded to the star bedroom and found his uncle propped up with pillows, throwing gruel at the parlourmaid. It was plain that he was in no elfin mood. He was looking like a mass murderer, though his face lacked the genial expression which you often see in mass murderers, and he glared at Conky with the sort of wild regret which sweeps over an irritable man when he sees a loved one approaching his sick bed and realizes that he has used up all the gruel.
“What ho, Uncle Everard,” said Conky. “The story going the round of the clubs is that you have bust a joint of sorts. What happened?”
Lord Plumpton scowled darkly. He looked now like a mass murderer whose stomach ulcers are paining him.
“I’ll tell you what happened. You remember I had to leave you at Lord’s to attend a committee meeting at my club. Well, as I was walking back from the club, there were some children playing cricket in the street and one of them skied the ball towards extra cover, so naturally I ran out into the road to catch it. I judged it to a nicety and had just caught it when a homicidal lunatic of a girl came blinding along at ninety miles an hour in her car and knocked me base over apex. One of these days,” said Lord Plumpton, licking his lips, “I hope to meet that girl again, preferably down a dark alley. I shall skin her very slowly with a blunt knife, dip her in boiling oil, sever her limb from limb, assemble those limbs on the pavement and dance on them.”
“And rightly,” said Conky. “These girls who bust your ankles and prevent you going to Lord’s tomorrow need a sharp lesson.”
“What do you mean, prevent me going to Lord’s to-morrow? Do you think a mere sprained ankle will stop me going to a cricket match? I shall be there, with you at my side. And now,” said Lord Plumpton, wearying of these exchanges, “go to hell!”
Conky did not go to hell, but he went downstairs and out on to the front steps to get a breath of air. He was feeling low and depressed. He had been so certain that he would be able to get to-morrow off. He had turned to go in again when he heard a noise of brakes as a car drew up behind him.
“Excuse me,” said a voice. “Could I see Lord Plumpton?”
Simple words, but their effect on Conky as he recognised that silvery voice was to make him quiver from stay-combed hair to shoe sole. He uttered a whinnying cry which, as he swivelled round and for the first time was privileged to see her face, became a gasp. The voice had been the voice of an angel. The face measured up to the voice.
Seeing him, she too gasped. This was apt to be the reaction of the other sex on first beholding Conky Biddle, for though his I.Q. was low his outer crust was rather sensational. He was, indeed, a dazzlingly good-looking young man, who out-Caryed Grant and began where Gregory Peck left off.
“I say,” he said, going to the car and placing a foot on the running-board, “Don’t look now, but did I by chance hear you expressing a wish to meet my uncle, Lord Plumpton?”
“That’s right. I recently flattened him out with my car, and I was planning to give him some flowers.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Conky. “I really wouldn’t. I say this as a friend. Time, the great healer, will have to pull up
its socks and spit on its hands quite a bit before it becomes safe for you to enter the presence.”
“I see. Then I’ll take the blooms around the corner and have them delivered by a messenger boy. How’s that, umpire?”
Conky winced. It was as though he had heard this divine creature sully her lips with something out of a modern historical novel.
“Good God!” he said. “Where did you pick up that obscene expression?”
“From your uncle. He was chanting it at the top of his voice when I rammed him. A mental case, I imagine. What does it mean?”
“It’s what you say at cricket.”
“Cricket!” The girl shuddered strongly. “Shall I tell you what I think of cricket?”
“I have already heard your views. Your car got stuck abaft my taxi in a traffic block this evening. I was here, if you follow what I mean, and you were there, a few feet to the nor’-nor’-east, so I was able to drink in what you were saying about cricket. Would you mind if I thanked you with tears in my eyes?”
“Not at all. But don’t you like cricket? I thought all Englishmen loved it.”
“Not this Englishman. It gives me the pip.”
“Me, too. I ought never to have gone near that Lord’s place. But in a moment of weakness I let myself be talked into it by my fiancé.”
Conky reeled.
“Oh, my sainted aunt! Have you got a fiancé?”
“Not now.”
Conky stopped reeling.
“Was he the bloke you were talking to in the car?”
“That’s right. Eustace Davenport-Simms. I think he plays for Essex or Sussex or somewhere. My views were too subversive for him, so after kidding back and forth for a while we decided to cancel the order for the wedding cake.”
“I thought he seemed a bit sniffy.”
“He got sniffler.”
“Very sensible of you not to marry a cricketer.”
“So I felt.”
“The upshot, then, when all the smoke has blown away, is that you are once more in circulation?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s fine,” said Conky. A sudden thought struck him. “I say, would you object if I pressed your little hand?”
“Some other time, I think.”
“Any time that suits you.”
“You see, I have to hie me back to my hotel and dress. I’m late already, and my father screams like a famished hyæna if he’s kept waiting for his rations.”
And with a rapid thrust of her shapely foot she set the machinery in motion and vanished round the corner on two wheels, leaving Conky staring after her with a growing feeling of desolation. He had just realized that he was unaware of her name, address and telephone number and had had what was probably his last glimpse of her. If the expression “Ships that pass in the night” had been familiar to him, he would certainly have uttered it, using clenched teeth for the purpose.
It was a Conky with heart bowed down and a general feeling of having been passed through the wringer who accompanied his uncle to Lord’s next morning. The thought that a Grade A soulmate had come into his life and buzzed out again, leaving no clue to her identity or whereabouts, was a singularly bitter one. Lord Plumpton on the journey to the Mecca of cricket spoke well and easily of the visit of the Australian team of 1921, but Conky proved a distrait listener; so distrait that Lord Plumpton prodded him irascibly in the ribs and called him an infernal goggle-eyed fathead, which of course he was.
He was still in a sort of trance when they took their seats in the pavilion, but here it was less noticeable, for everybody else was in a sort of trance. The somnambulists out in the field tottered to and fro, and the spectators lay back and let their eyes go glassy. For perhaps an hour nothing happened except that Hedger of Middlesex, waking like Abou ben Adhem from a deep dream of peace, flicked his bat at a rising ball and edged it into the hands of a sleeper dozing in what is technically known as the gully. Then Lord Plumpton, who had been silent except for an occasional “Nice! Nice!” sat up with a sudden jerk and an explosive “Well, I’m dashed!” and glared sideways at the three shilling seats which adjoined the pavilion. And Conky, following his gaze, felt his heart execute four separate buck and wing steps and come to rest quivering like a jelly in a high wind.
“Well, I’m dashed!” said Lord Plumpton, continuing to direct at the three shilling seats the kind of look usually associated with human fiends in mystery stories. “There’s that blasted girl!”
It was not a description which Conky himself would have applied to the divinest of her sex, nor one which he enjoyed hearing applied to liner, and for a moment he was in two minds as to whether to haul off and sock his relative on the beezer. Wiser counsels prevailed, and he said:
“Yes, there she spouts.”
Lord Plumpton seemed surprised.
“You know her?”
“Just slightly. She ran into me last night.”
“Into you, too? Good gad, the female’s a public menace. If she’s allowed to remain at large, the population of London will be decimated. I’ve a good mind to go over and tell her what I think of her.”
“But your uncle, ankle.”
“What the devil are you gibbering about?”
“I mean your ankle, uncle. You mustn’t walk about on it. How would it be if I popped over and acquainted her with your displeasure?”
Lord Plumpton considered.
“Yes, that’s not a bad idea. A surprisingly good idea, in fact, considering what a nitwit you are. But pitch it strong.”
“Oh, I will,” said Conky.
He rose and hurried off, and Lord Plumpton fell into conversation with the barely animate spectator on his left. They were soon deep in an argument as to whether it was at square leg or at extra cover that D. C. L. Wodger of Gloucestershire had fielded in 1904.
If the girl had looked like the better class of angel in the uncertain light of last night, she looked more than ever so in the reasonably bright sunshine of to-day. She was one of those lissom girls of medium height. Her eyes and hair were a browny hazel. The general effect was of a seraph who ate lots of yeast.
“Oh, hullo,” said Conky, lowering himself into a seat beside her. ‘We meet again, what?”
She seemed surprised and startled. In her manner, as she gazed at his clean-cut face and then into his frank blue eyes, there was something that might almost be described as fluttering.
“You!” she cried. “What are you doing here?”
“Just watching cricket.”
“But you told me last night that cricket gave you the pip, which I imagine is something roughly equivalent to the megrims or the heeby-jeebies.”
“Quite. But, you see, it’s like this. My uncle is crazy about the ghastly game and I’m dependent on him, so when he says ‘Come along and watch cricket’, I have to come along and watch it like a lynx.”
The girl frowned. It was as if she had been hurt and disappointed.
“Why are you dependent on your uncle? Why don’t you get a job?”
Conky hastened to defend himself.
“I do get a job. I get dozens of jobs. But I lose them all. The trouble is, you see, that I’m not very bright.”
“No?”
“Not very. That’s why they call me Conky.”
“Do they call you Conky?”
“Invariably. What started it was an observation one of the masters at school happened to drop one day. He said, addressing me— To attempt to drive information into your head, Biddle, is no easy task, for Providence, mysterious in its workings has, given you instead of the more customary human brain a skull full of concrete.’ So after that everyone called me Conky.”
“I see. What sort of jobs have you tried?”
“Practically everything except Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.”
“And you get fired every time?”
“Every time.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s dashed white of you to be sorry, but as a m
atter of fact it’s all right.”
“How do you mean it’s all right?”
Conky hesitated. Then he reflected that if you couldn’t confide in an angel in human shape, who could you confide in? He glanced about him. Except for themselves, the three shilling tier of seats was almost empty.
“Well, you’ll keep it under your hat, won’t you, because it’s supposed to be very hush-hush at the moment. I am on the eve of making a stupendous fortune. You know sea water?”
“The stuff that props the ship up when you come over from New York?”
“That’s right. Well, you probably aren’t aware of it, but it’s full of gold, and I’m in with a fellow who’s got a secret process for scooping it out. I saw his advertisement in the paper saying that if you dashed along and brassed up quick you could get in on an invention of vast possibilities, so I dashed along and brassed up. He was a nice chap and let me into the thing without a murmur. Bloke of the name of MacSporran. I happened to have scraped up ten quid, so I put that in and he tells me that at a conservative estimate I shall get back about two hundred and fifty thousand. I call that a nice profit.”
“Very nice.”
“Yes, it’s all very convenient. And when I say that, I’m not thinking so much of the jolliness of having all that splosh in the old sock, I am alluding more to the difference this has made in what you might call my matrimonial plans. If I want to get married, I mean. What I’m driving at,” said Conky, giving her a melting look, “is that I am now in a position, when I meet the girl I love, to put the binge on a practical basis.”
“I see.”
“In fact,” said Conky, edging a little closer, “I might almost start making my plans at once.”
“That’s the spirit. Father’s slogan is ‘Do it now’, and he’s a tycoon.”
“I thought a tycoon was a sort of storm.”
“No, a millionaire.”
“Is your father a millionaire?”
“Yes, and more pouring in all the time.”
Blanding Castle Omnibus Page 219